Apollo:An American Victory in the
Cold War

Paul D. Spudis

This week
will mark the 30th anniversary of the first landing on the Moon by
the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969.Much attention will be paid to this anniversary, commemorating the
mission’s historical significance and how it revolutionized science and
technology.Indeed, the Apollo program
was a boon to science in that the data returned from the Moon landings created
a new paradigm through which to view the origin and evolution of our solar
system.Moreover, Apollo’s
contributions to technology development, commonly called “spin-off”,
undoubtedly created wealth, new products, and innovations that have made our
lives safer, easier, and happier.

But the
real significance of Apollo never seems to be discussed.It’s commonly acknowledged that the
initiation of the Apollo program by President John F. Kennedy in May, 1961 was
done primarily for reasons of national prestige, part of our ongoing geopolitical
struggle with the Soviet Union.Even
academic scientists, as insular and parochial as they are, recognize that
Apollo was not undertaken for scientific reasons.Nor was the goal of a Moon landing undertaken for its own sake –
in the words of Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Everest, “Because it’s
there.”The great explorations of the
Victorian age had become an irrelevancy in the age of the ICBM and push-button
warfare.No, the goal of the Moon was a
technological challenge, a gauntlet thrown down before our global competitor,
the Soviet Union, challenging them to a technocratic fight to the finish.Although it is commonly acknowledged that we
won this challenge, the profound effects of that victory are less often
considered.

Despite
their subsequent claims to the contrary, it is now clear that in the early
sixties, the Soviets had accepted Kennedy’s challenge.The breathless competition in space at that
time was conducted with a seriousness that we can scarcely credit these days,
with each new “first” being heralded as the key to space success (and by
inference, global domination).The
Soviets orbited the first satellite, the first man, the first woman, and were
the first to hit the Moon with a man-made object.They orbited the first multi-man crews and one of their
cosmonauts, Aleksei Leonov, made the first “walk in space,” floating outside
his spacecraft in 1965.America,
stumbling at first, rapidly caught up and matched most Soviet
achievements.We soon began making our
own space firsts – the first rendezvous and docking in orbit, long duration
space walks, and the successful flight of the giant Saturn V booster.But everyone knew the high-stakes measure of
success – to be the first to reach the Moon with people.

A series of
momentous events, only some fully visible to the public, in late 1968 and early
1969 sealed the fate of the world’s first “space race.”In America, the successful Christmas-time
flight of Apollo 8 into lunar orbit captured the imagination of the world.A few months later, the first Lunar Module,
the vehicle designed to land men on the Moon, was successfully tested in Earth
orbit during the flight of Apollo 9.These two events all but assured that the United States would accomplish
its goal of landing a man on the Moon, “before this decade is out.”This goal was finally realized with the epic
flight of Apollo 11 in July of 1969.In
contrast, and largely unknown to the world until recently, the Soviet Moon
rocket, the gigantic N-1, a vehicle even larger than the American Saturn V,
blew up twice—one booster detonated on the pad and another rocket exploded a
few tens of seconds after lift-off.These disastrous failures, covered-up for 25 years, sealed the fate of
the Soviet Moon program.Without an
operational heavy lift booster to deliver their spacecraft, no Soviet lunar
mission was possible.America won the
Moon.

Although
the meaning of Apollo was debated endlessly in the western press, often in a
naïve and fatuous manner (e.g., “we spent $24 billion for a box of rocks?”),
what lessons did the Soviet Union draw from this disaster?Apparently, the Soviets became convinced
that, in programs of vast technical scope, particularly those requiring the
practical application of high technology (e.g., high-speed computing) to very
complex problems, America could accomplish anything.The Soviets viewed the Americans as having achieved, though a
combination of great wealth, technical skill, and resolute determination, an
extremely difficult technological goal—one which they themselves had attempted
and failed, at great cost both in human lives and national treasure.

What effect
did such a calculus have on future actions?In 1983, another President, Ronald W. Reagan, called upon the scientific
and technical community of the United States and the free world, who had given
the world nuclear weapons, to develop a missile defense – one that would make
America and other countries free from the fear of nuclear annihilation.This program, the Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI, or “Star Wars” to its critics) was specifically conceived to
counter the prevailing strategic doctrine of “mutually assured destruction
(MAD)”, in which a nation would never start a nuclear war because it would fear
its own destruction by retaliatory strikes.The price of peace in a MAD scenario was to live in a state of permanent
fear.The promise of SDI was to
eliminate that fear by defending ourselves from nuclear missile attack.

The
Strategic Defense Initiative was roundly criticized and belittled by many in
the west, who thought it “destabilizing.”Numerous scientists, including those who had done weapons work,
criticized it as “unachievable.”Arms
control “specialists” decried “Star Wars” as “provocative” and an escalation of
the nuclear arms race.But Reagan did
not listen to the naysayers and insisted that SDI proceed.The number one foreign policy objective of
the Soviet Union in the last years of its existence was to eliminate SDI.The famous Reykjavik Summit of 1986
collapsed on this point, when Reagan would not trade SDIto Gobachev and the Soviets in exchange for
massive cuts in ballistic missiles.

If the bulk
of academic and diplomatic opinion was so averse to SDI and the very idea of
missile defense was so “unworkable,” why then did the Soviet Union fight so
long and adamantly against it?Clearly,
the Soviet Union was convinced the SDI would
work and that we would achieve exactly what we set out to do.Here is Apollo’s legacy:Any technological challenge America
undertakes, it can accomplish.The
reason this legacy had currency was the success of Apollo.We had attempted and successfully achieved a
technical goal—one so difficult and demanding, that it made virtually any
similar goal seem equally achievable.Moreover, this was a goal that the Soviets themselves had attempted and
failed.They reasoned that getting into
a decade-long competition with America on SDI would similarly end in an
American victory and would be a race that would bankrupt and destroy their
system, as indeed, it did.

President
Kennedy started Apollo and the race to the Moon as a Cold War gambit; a way to
demonstrate the superiority of a free and democratic way of life to that of our
communist adversaries.That goal was
successfully achieved to a degree still not fully appreciated today.The success of the Apollo program gave
America something it did not realize was so important – technical
credibility.When President Reagan
announced SDI twenty years later, the Soviets were against it, not because it
was destabilizing and provocative, but because they thought we would succeed,
rendering their vast military machine, assembled at great cost to their people
and economy, obsolete in an instant.Among other factors, this hastened the end of the Cold War in our favor.

Space
advocates often lament the lack of direction of today’s space program.An unspoken concern by many who feel this
way is the accompanying lack of determination and commitment in our current
space program.They look back wistfully
on the glory days of Apollo, when esprit
de corps was high, the work days were long and hard, and sleeves were
rolled up and teeth were set in determination.It was like a war then.It
was.And we won it.